It's the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and many of you
are suffering through cold and snows, looking for something to brighten
your days. Actually, to be honest, we wouldn't know anything about that,
since we're penning these lines in the heart of 73-degree San
Francisco, where the constant jackhammering outside our office has
driven us to the brink of giving it all up for a cabin in the woods.

Fortunately for you, we're afraid of bears, and so we shall press on
to tell you about the latest happenings at Gandi, including the grand
opening of our IRC channel, our new private VLAN tools, and no less than
19 promotions on domain names.

We've also lowered prices on .IO domains, rolled out privacy
protection on .XYZ, released dozens of new TLDs, and are simply
jackhammeringly feverish with excitement about next month!

Gandi would like to wish all of you a happy new year, with best wishes and many thanks to all of you for being our customer. 2014 was a phenomenal year for us, and we finished it off by sending the donations from our December campaign with .xyz to Creative Commons, FreeBSD and Fight for the Future.

In 2015, we will be here to help you in your online endeavors, whether it's growing your online business, updating your blog, renewing your domains or deploying your web app. And to help you navigate the seas of new gTLDs, we are rolling out a new TLD suggestion engine--see below for details. You will also find our provisional January gTLD release calandar, advice on the price of .NET, and our promos for the year (there are some great ones!

It is a distinctly European week in domains, this first week of December, with launches for .PARIS, .BZH (for the Brittany region, and also pretty fun to say out loud), and next week .IMMO (how you abbreviate real restate in French). Later this month are some very cool general openings as well, like .SOFTWARE and .PIZZA (Dec 10). Since these TLDs go together so naturally, it should be an interesting day, indeed. If you are wondering what else is happening in domains this month, check out our release calendar at the end of this newsletter.

The Gandi US team was all over the country in November; you can read about our escapades in this post!

It was an interesting month, with a .XYZ promo for only $4, and a .CLUB promo for $6.50. While the .CLUB domain is back up to normal for the moment, don't count them out! We are cooking up some interesting things for that TLD. And .XYZ, who will not hesitate to dress in purple and dance to get you to dream up a great domain with their extension, have gone and created a very Gandi-like promo for you: they will donate $0.50 for each domain sold in the month of November to the EFF. And nobody puts Gandi in the corner, so we're matching.

Our friends at Uniregistry are getting promos set up for .BLACKFRIDAY. Keep your eyes open for this one, all you e-commerce people. We'll send smoke signals when it's ready (and maybe also post on our news feed).

This month, Simple hosting instances will be upgraded to PHP 5.4, and we are making changes to the Gandi CLI approximately every 5 minutes. Thanks to those of you who have contributed so far!

Today, Gandi wants you to know about the Internet Slowdown, which is a part of the Battle for the Net. This action today is to call attention to the fact that the FCC is considering rules that will make it easier for big cable services like Verizon and Comcast to charge content providers for "fast lanes." It's a fast lane for those who pay up, and everyone else goes slow.

We will also be at #hack4good this weekend in San Francisco, making a difference for climate change.

The month of September is a busy one for new Top-Level domains in Europe, with the GoLive of .LONDON, .PARIS, .BZH, .BRUSSELS, .VLAADEREN, .COLOGNE, .KOELN and more. The US will have its share of fun, with some Western-style domains like .VEGAS, .RODEO, .HORSE, and .FISHING all going live, and of course that's not all...

A new promotion on .MX is also available this month - don't miss out on huge savings there.

We have enhanced our US operations to give you better support in western time zones, and to smooth out billing for US and Canadian customers.

This is also the last month you can take advantage of an incredible 50% off on .US!

Simple Hosting gets more useful this month, with an updated version of the WordPress installation tutorial to celebrate the release of WordPress 4.0! As you have come to expect, at the end of this newsletter you will find a roundup of current promotions available on Gandi.net.

A lot of people are aware that the FCC has proposed new rules that eviscerate what was known as Net Neutrality. Were you aware that if enacted, these rules will slow the internet down for almost everyone in the USA?
We have a chance to do something about it on September 10!

Note: We apologize in advance for the atrocio.us attempts at wordplay to come in the following paragraphs. There are six categories of humor we don't do, and patriotic humor is one of them. You have been warned. -Ed.

If you're reading this, you're by definition an interested party in the impending decision to be made by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding Net Neutrality. If you're an American citizen, it's up to you to influence what the FCC eventually does by sending your comments about the new rules it has proposed. We are sending ours in, contributing as founding members of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition's extensive submission, but your voice is also needed to move from weak Net Neutrality protections to the stronger Open Internet rules that the telecom companies can't get struck down in court.

It's July, and as part of our war on sunburns, we feel it's our duty
to give you some reasons to spend some time indoors. Remember that the
soft glow of your computer monitor won't cause any forms of cancer we're
aware of, whereas the sun is totally trying to kill you. A little
climate control never hurt anybody! Statistically, you're 78% less
likely to be eaten by a carcajou if you stay inside, preferably near a
device that would allow you to register domain names (should you be so
inclined). And that's a fact[1]. We commissioned a study[2].

It has been eight years since we started selling t-shirts to benefit Gandi's supported projects, and we're betting on
our customers' inexhaustible love of Gandi apparel once again. Today, we're announcing a brand new, special-edition series of shirts: it's two of your favorite logos in
one!

Last month, we reached a new milestone: 1.5 million domain names
registered at Gandi. Can you imagine? If you wrote each domain name on
an elephant and stacked the elephants on top of each other, you could
reach the moon!*

That number has been on the rise for 14 years
straight, and there are no signs of it slowing down anytime soon,
especially with all the new gTLDs coming out. Below, you'll find a
calendar of this month's new extensions.

The .CO registry has a great deal during April and May, and new .CO registrations are 75% this week only.

It has been a very busy last few weeks in terms of security. You'll find the details below.